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 V

THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES

interesting parallel might be drawn between the advance of the sailors over the ocean from Western Europe and the contemporary advance of the Russian Cossacks across the steppes of the Heartland. Yermak, the Cossack, rode over the Ural Mountains into Siberia in 1533, within a dozen years, that is to say, after Magellan's voyage round the world. The parallel might be repeated in regard to our own days. It was an unprecedented thing in the year 1900 that Britain should maintain a quarter of a million men in her war with the Boers at a distance of 6000 miles over the ocean; but it was as remarkable a feat for Russia to place an army of more than a quarter of a million men against the Japanese in Manchuria in 1904 at a distance of 4000 miles by rail. We have been in the habit of thinking that mobility by sea far outran mobility upon the land, and so for a time it did, but it is well 147